Wallace Stevens - The Snow Man

The Snow Man
by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.


For those who feel uneasy trying to read or understand modern poetry, NPR ran a short piece on this poem a while back (in 2005, the 50th anniversary year of Stevens' death), and the reviewer names this as the best short poem in the English language. It's hard to argue with that assessment, this is one of great American poems.

Wallace Stevens: 'The Snow Man'
by JAY KEYSER
November 29, 200512:00 AM

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Wallace Stevens won the Pulitzer Prize for his book Collected Poems in 1955.Corbis

Read the Poem: 'The Snow Man'

The American poet Wallace Stevens died 50 years ago this year. Commentator Jay Keyser says Stevens wrote the best short poem in the English language, "The Snow Man." Stevens marries what the poem is about with the way that it is built.

ROBERT SIEGEL, host:

Now in praise of Wallace Stevens. The American poet passed away 50 years ago this year. Commentator and linguist Jay Keyser saves his highest praise for one of Stevens' poems.

JAY KEYSER:

With something as personal as a poem, it's risky making hard and fast judgments. That won't stop me. I declare that Wallace Stevens wrote the best short poem in the English language, bar none, and in a minute I'll tell you why. But first, listen to the poem. It's called "The Snow Man."

(Reading) `One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine trees crusted with snow, and have been cold a long time to behold the juniper shagged with ice, the spruces rough in the distant glitter of the January sun, and not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind, in the sound of a few leaves, which is the sound of the land full of the same wind that is blowing in the same bare place for the listener, who listens in the snow and, nothing himself, beholds nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.'

Why is this poem so good? Unlike any other English poem I've read, "The Snow Man" marries what it's about with the way it's built. If you were to parse it the way I was taught in high school, diagraming all those clauses and phrases on those slanted lines, you would come up with a perfectly balanced mobile built around the conjunction `and.' That's the trick of the poem. Each clause seems to be coming to an end and then suddenly up pops another `and.'

It begins `One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine trees crusted with snow.' Fine, that looks like the end of the first sentence. But, no, it goes on impelled by `and.' `One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine trees crusted with snow and have been cold a long time to behold the juniper shagged with ice, the spruces rough in the distant glitter of the January sun.' There, we're finished with the `ands.' Think again. The very next word in the poem is another pesky `and.' Stevens is forcing his readers to reanalyze what they have just read again and again and again.

I once put all the words of the poem on little white cards and made a mobile out of it. It dangled, perfectly balanced, like an Alexander Calder creation. The poem, twisting and turning when I blew on it, became the visual counterpart of what it's about.

But what is it about? The poem is a recipe for seeing things as they really are. To do that, you must see the world the way the snow man does. The snow man is free of human biases. He knows that in winter the days aren't cold and miserable; you are. To see like him, you must constantly challenge your own assumptions. It's one thing to say that in words. It's quite another to say it in the structure the words hang on. No one did it before. No one has done it since. You can measure great jugglers by how many balls they keep in the air. It's the same thing with poets.

Charles Bukowski was a mediocre poet and fiction writer. His work was brutally honest and it chronicled, sometimes in excruciating detail, the life he actually lived - painful, wounded, drunken, and more than a little outside the lines. The result body of work sells more books than Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey.

Open Culture marked his birthday last week with the best biography I have seen about his life.

There is nothing great or exceptional about Bukowski - other than his willingness to lay bare his life on the page. How many of us would be willing to be that raw, that open about our weaknesses and failures? How many of us can turn those dark places into something many people see as art?

Bukowski: Born Into This — The Definitive Documentary on the Hard-Living American Poet (2003)

August 15th, 2012

Neglected to mark the occasion of poet and novelist Charles Bukowski‘s birthday yesterday? Then observe it today with a viewing of the documentary Bukowski: Born Into This. The most in-depth exploration of Bukowski’s life yet committed to film, the movie “is valuable because it provides a face and a voice to go with the work,” wrote Roger Ebert in 2004. “Ten years have passed since Bukowski’s death, and he seems likely to last, if not forever, then longer than many of his contemporaries. He outsells Kerouac and Kesey, and his poems, it almost goes with saying, outsell any other modern poet on the shelf.” A wide range of Bukowski enthusiasts both expected and unexpected appear onscreen: Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Harry Dean Stanton, Black Sparrow Press publisher John Martin, filmmaker Taylor Hackford (director of the earlier documentary titled simply Bukowski), and Bono, to name but a few. “Excerpts are skillfully woven with the reminiscences of former drinking buddies, fellow writers and Bukowski’s second wife, Linda, the keeper of the flame, whom he married in 1985,” wrote Stephen Holden in the New York Times. “Without straining, the film makes a strong case for Bukowski as a major American poet whose work was a slashing rebuke to polite academic formalism.”

Some might contrarily consider Bukowski’s writing glorified wallowing, a mere profane exultation of the low life, but Born Into This reveals that the man wrote as he lived and lived as he wrote, omitting neither great embarrassment nor minor triumph. Holden mentions that Bukowski, “a pariah in high school, suffered from severe acne vulgaris, which covered his face with running sores that left his skin deeply pitted. He recalls standing miserably in the dark outside his senior prom, too humiliated to show himself,” and that for all his work dealing with late-life sexual prowess, “he was a virgin until he was 24, the same age at which his first story was published. His description of sexual initiation with an obese woman whom he wrongly accused of stealing his wallet is a spectacularly unpromising beginning to the prolific sexual activity (described in his novel “Women”) that flowered after fame brought admirers.” Ebert asks the obvious question: “How much was legend, how much was pose, how much was real?”  Then he answers it: “I think it was all real, and the documentary suggests as much. There were no shields separating the real Bukowski, the public Bukowski and the autobiographical hero of his work. They were all the same man. Maybe that’s why his work remains so immediate and affecting: The wounded man is the man who writes, and the wounds he writes about are his own.”

You can find Born Into This listed in the Documentaries section of our collection of 500 Free Movies Online, or purchase your own copy on Amazon here.

Related content:

• Charles Bukowski: Depression and Three Days in Bed Can Restore Your Creative Juices (NSFW)
• The Last (Faxed) Poem of Charles Bukowski
• Tom Waits Reads Charles Bukowski
• Bono Reads Two Poems by Charles Bukowski, “Laureate of American Lowlife”
• Charles Bukowski Reads His Poem “The Secret of My Endurance”

~ Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.